Themes
Marco Goldin

OBLIGATORY PREMISE

The border is the central theme of the 2025 European Capital of Culture, Nova Gorica and Gorizia together.

FIRST THEME

I consider it a privilege of this work—an adventure like few others.
You are given a word, a single word, from which to set out on a journey both known and unknown, through skies and gardens. And sometimes, even more deeply, it seems, into that secret place which is the innermost point within us. You might call it the soul—if it were not almost daring to name it.
The soul, in which the transformation of the mortal into the immortal takes place.

The border, as soul, contains within itself this duality, and Walt Whitman expressed it perfectly when he wrote:

The soul,
ever and forever: longer than the earth
shall be solid and brown, longer than the sea shall have tides and flow.
I will write the poems of the material things, for I believe they are the most spiritual;
I will write the poems of my body and of mortality,
and thus I will give to myself the poems of my soul and of immortality.

It is at once the boundary of the universe and one’s own inner boundary.
To be experienced as a single substance, in the moment when the blooming of a rose and the distant sunset become one and the same.
Through the eyes of the beholder. Here, now, within.

SECOND THEME

That single word—border. And there is nothing more heroic than the search for a direction.
One that must first be chosen—unless, of course, it is the direction that chooses you.
Then you see the border, you stop, you cross it; and sometimes you even turn back, because what you discover, and what you feel, can be frightening.

The border carries within itself something heroic, and those who set out on that journey do so in the very dimension of the hero.
They are the ones who live an experience that goes beyond the human, thus anticipating a time and a place that others will be granted to experience only later.

The border is a space one can see and breathe—sometimes invisible, yet always sensed.
You walk along the paths, looking to every side, noticing everything, embracing a light that stretches to its furthest limit.
You are led toward exploration, while every road seems almost insufficient to encompass the entirety of that border.

Another great poet, Fernando Pessoa, expressed it beautifully:

My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
I have the habit of walking the streets
looking to the right and to the left,
and sometimes looking behind me.
And what I see at each moment
is something I have never seen before,
and I know how to notice it very well.

THIRD THEME

To turn, then, the word border into a reflection in color. A story.
Not to let it remain isolated in some higher realm, but instead to find painters who have taken up the challenge of painting the border.

They—true forerunners—stand at the head of a multitude, even if they are sometimes unaware of it.
They seek a light that recalls the time of the beginning of things, that primordial moment from which one must set out.
The border is not only a point of arrival or of crossing over; it can also be the starting ground, the place of departure.

The painters of the border are therefore wanderers: they are unafraid to look—and then to paint.
They turn equally toward the depth of the sky and the expanse of the sea, toward the blooming of a garden and toward what they encounter within themselves.

And then, that reflection in color—born from a single word, border—is happily transformed into an exhibition.
Not by magic, but through long study, reading, research, and discovery.

Yes, to be caught by surprise, unprepared when it happens—and it is then, in that very moment, that emotion takes hold of you, and that is when you can begin to move.
The body rises from the ground—it is the evangelical “arise and walk.”
The body rises from the ground, and for those painters, so courageous, there are no limits to the border.

It would indeed be fitting to accept the invitation that T. S. Eliot offers in the third movement of his Four Quartets:

Not farewell,
but fare forward, voyagers.

And not toward a single border, but rather turning the singular into the plural, so that one may fully and profoundly grasp the richness of a word that thus becomes a feeling—one that embraces the multiplicity of things and allows us to say: Here they are—the borders.

FOURTH THEME

And if something has already been understood, it is that the exhibition born from this single word—border—maintains a strong, indissoluble bond with poetry.
Indeed, it cannot, in any way, do without it.

It spans two centuries—the nineteenth and the twentieth—both in Europe and in America.
It deals with strength and with doubt, and the word always accompanies color.

These are painters who have felt the meaningful weight of a challenge, have accepted it, and have traced paths toward those borders.
They have traveled by land and by sea, risen among the clouds, and journeyed within themselves—each, in their own way, to tell the greatness of life.

As often happens, we leave it to Vincent van Gogh to speak the direction of the journey.
In a letter from August 1883, he wrote to his brother Theo:
“I feel a debt toward the world, and also an obligation—since I have walked upon it for thirty years—to leave it, as a token of gratitude, some remembrance in the form of drawings or paintings—not made to please this or that trend, but to express a sincere human feeling.”

And so it shall be in this exhibition: the discovery of a sincere human feeling—one that moves, delights, and unsettles.

FIFTH THEME

If from a single word—border—comes the beginning, then this exhibition began to take shape, to come alive within me, as both a path to be walked and a story to be composed, from a passage in De Rerum Natura, where Lucretius lingers between the notions of border and infinity.
It is a passage of extraordinary fascination, binding humankind to the universe through the power of thought. Exactly what this exhibition seeks to do, both in its overall conception and in the articulation of its various sections:

Everything that exists is therefore unlimited in every sense;
for otherwise it would have to possess an end.
But it is evident that nothing can have an end
if beyond it there is not something else to limit it,
so that a point appears which the faculties of sense can neither follow nor surpass.
Now, since it must be acknowledged that nothing can exist outside the whole,
the universe has neither end, nor boundary, nor measure.
Nor does it matter in which part of it you stand;
always, wherever one may stop,
on every side the universe remains equally infinite.

It is the idea of the infinite border, of the infinite universe.
A boundary endlessly pushed farther away, until it dissolves.
A line to be reached and crossed—a line that becomes the very dustlike substance of the universe.
The border itself becomes the universe.

And this occurs not only in the spasmodic tension that has always drawn humankind toward the vast dimensions of nature—the sky, the mountain, and the sea—but also in the immense expansion that, through the eyes, plunges into the depths of the inner creation.
Socrates expressed it beautifully in the Alcibiades:

“He who bids us know ourselves commands us to know our soul.”

That is why this exhibition pauses, at one of its points, to dwell upon gazes and faces—seeking that border which does not unfold in the natural landscape but resides within the inward turn of the eyes.
There is fixed one of the most poignant and moving points in the history of painted borders: the gaze that opens onto the silent gong of the unconscious.
And it is precisely there that the exhibition, beyond so many landscapes I believe will not easily be forgotten, arrives and meets its truest depth.